1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to providing wireless access to networks, and, more particularly, to providing wireless access to networks on a pay-per-use basis without requiring a subscription service.
2. Description of the Related Art
One of the common characteristics of today's hotspot service business is that the service providers ambitiously aim at large scale deployments. There are two basic models for such WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) operators. In one of the models, an a wireless carrier deploys its own network and charges customers for using it by having customers subscribe to their network service. In the other of the models, WISPs become partners with a wide-area network provider that will handle the billing and customers subscribe with the provider for the network service. In the former model, the subscribers can only use the one (or a small number of affiliated) WISP but they still have the overhead of signing up and being billed for this particular site. In the latter model, the wide area network provider will offer integrated access to all partnered networks and consolidated billing, but tends to charge more for this service (both the WISP and the provider/aggregator are getting paid) in return for offering this larger coverage.
Wide-area WISP providers promise customers access to many hotspots, large continuous coverage areas, and roaming services. Consequently with such a deployment plan in which a customer is able to get access service at any of the deployment points of the same provider, the service follows a centralized subscription model. After signing up, customers can be AAA-ed (authenticated, authorized, and accounted) by the wide area network provider and obtain access service at any of the hotspot locations belonging to the same provider network.
However, such a business model has some inherent problems.
Firstly, the cost of setting up the business is high due to its large scale of operation. For this subscription model to be successful, the business needs to attract enough customers. Thus, to justify the monthly charges and provide more value to attract more customers, the service provider needs to deploy more hotspots or attract more service providing partners. Although in general deploying a single Wi-Fi access point (AP) is cheap, with large number of AP's to deploy, the total cost becomes high. Atop of these costs, the ISP connection cost for these AP's, client premise installation issues, and maintenances all contribute to hotspot business costs.
Secondly, since the Wi-Fi spectrum is part of the ISM frequency band and is unlicensed, any company can deploy its own hotspot services. Thus in busy districts there are likely multiple service providers crowding into the same areas and providing overlapping hotspot services. However, the bandwidth available for Wi-Fi is limited and competition between providers will worsen channel congestion situations.
Thirdly, roaming has been regarded as one of the “must-have” features for hotspot services. This is a tradition from the cellular industry that the hotspot service providers are also trying to follow. For cellular users, a roaming feature is essential as a user not only makes outgoing calls, but also expects incoming calls. For routing incoming calls to roaming users, the cellular phone industry has developed large subscriber databases to track users across service areas and service operators so that incoming calls for the users can be forwarded. However for a typical hotspot user, the usage pattern is very different. Almost all Internet applications follow the “client polling” type of access model where usually it is the mobile user who initiates any TCP/IP (Transport Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol) connections and the user does not typically expect incoming IP connections. If only this type of usage pattern is considered, there can be much lighter-weight system solutions and the whole AAA architecture as developed by many hotspot service providers is not necessary.
Fourthly, seamless handoff is another feature provided by cellular phone system for mobile users. When users travel across the boundaries between cells, phone calls are not disconnected. Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and video streaming applications have been promoted as two of the driving applications for hotspots because of the potential cost reduction and higher bandwidth compared to carrying traffic for these types of traffic over cellular telephony links. In addition, these two types of applications are really the major reason for providing seamless handoff. However, several issues seriously will limit the popularity and use of these two types of applications.
Seamless handoff is a much more difficult technical problem for hotspot services due to two facts: a) Wi-Fi cells are much smaller so that handoff occurs much more frequently than in cellular cells, and b) all current Wi-Fi client devices are single transceiver devices so it is not possible for the device to negotiate a smooth handoff. This would require the device to contact the new access point while maintaining communication with the old access point, to accomplish a “make-before-break” type of handoff as in cellular systems. With only one transceiver, Wi-Fi handoff is interruptive to the on-going communication and frequent handoff affects real-time traffic quality. Recent work on fast roaming and handoff will reduce the interruption time, but will not eliminate it. Another issue is that the Internet infrastructure is not yet in place. For an IP network to be able to perform handoff within large areas, the IP mobility management infrastructure, such as the deployment of Mobile IP needs to be in place. In addition, VoIP and streaming video applications typically require special hardware such as gateways which are not widely available. Lastly, the users are not familiar with the technologies and the requirement for user education is another reason preventing the growth of the use of such applications.
Excluding peer-to-peer traffic, currently interactions with the world wide web are the most dominant traffic on the Internet. Other major application traffic types belong to Internet gaming and other traditional applications. VoIP and streaming video traffic currently only count for less than 2% of the total Internet backbone traffic. Hence in the short term, seamless handoff is not as important as many hotspot service providers claim.
In summary, the current hotspot business model is too ambitious and heavy weight. It resembles the cellular operator business model and disregards the special characteristics of Wi-Fi technology. The Wi-Fi technology has small cells and uses unlicensed radio bands which result in opposite conditions from the cellular phone technologies. There are also many differences in usage patterns between IP traffic that would be carried over a hotspot and voice traffic carried over the cellular network, for example.
Also in the current hotspot business model, a large service infrastructure is provided and complex accounting for usage is necessary. In addition, this model relies on a large subscriber base to support such an infrastructure.